In recent years, several empirical studies have been conducted to investigate whether people think it is possible to lie with deceptive implicatures. While the findings are not clear cut, there is quite strong evidence that at least some cases of deceptive implicatures are considered to be lies. Moreover, it has been found that some literally true utterances that convey a false implicature are judged to be false.

In the present paper, we investigate whether the aforementioned phenomena can be generalized to different languages and cultures. Moreover, we test the degree to which human judgments are aligned with judgments elicit by artificial intelligences (in the form of LLMs such as ChatGPT). To these aims, we conducted a cross-cultural study in which participants were presented with ten cases of deceptive implicatures and asked to judge whether the speaker lied and (in a different condition) whether what she said was true or false. 3660 participants (183 per condition; 366 per country) were recruited in ten countries (USA, UK, South Africa, Spain, Chile, Mexico, Israel, Germany, China, and Japan). Surprisingly, highly similar result patterns were found between countries, with correlations between different countries being higher than correlations between humans and AI.